Wind Map is “a living portrait of of the wind currents over the U.S.”, conceived and developed as a side-project by the data visualization super-team of Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, who lead Google’s Big Picture visualization research group (and before that, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab).

This beautiful, perpetually-animated online ap pulls publicly available data of surface wind speeds from the National Digital Forecast Database, which is updated hourly. The map shows the patterns created by winds ranging from 1-30 miles-per-hour. Pan and zoom functionality allows observation in fine detail.

Of the project, the artists write: “It conveys the movement of the air in the most basic way: with visual motion. As an artwork that reflects the real-world, its emotional meaning changes from day to day. On calm days it can be a soothing meditation on the environment; during hurricanes it can become ominous and frightening.”

Fonts In Use showcases “type at work in the real world.” The site is organized into industries, formats, and typefaces and each entry dives into more detail about the font(s) and its use on various materials. It’s grown quite a bit since I last checked and is shaping up to be a very useful resource. It has also been added to our Creative Resources section, under “Type.”

Julian Wolkenstein wrote in to inform us of the launch of Echoism, an iPhone app/website based off a series of photographs he shot in 2010, entitled Symmeytrical Portraits. Like the photos above, the app generates two versions of you, the left you and the right you.

There is a myth, some say a science, suggesting people who have more symmetrical faces are considered more “attractive.“ “Echoism” plays with the notion of your own identity. What do you look like? What are the things that make you look like you – your identifying features? If you are made symmetrical, do you consider yourself more beautiful, less so, or is it just weird? Or is it you at all? Do you have a best side? What is to be said of left and right brain dominance?